Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Georges Borchardt

My wife and I did the same
thing.
You probably had the same
experience. It gets too cumbersome to always have to explain the situation. And
your wife meets people who might ask her out for a date. It's just simpler if
you're married. I remember we were at a party, maybe at Henry Carlisle's, and
there were several people there. Somebody told Anne about this new firm that
was starting: Atheneum. But by the time we got home, she'd forgotten the names
of the people who were involved, including the name of the person who had told
her, who had also asked her for a date, which she had turned down. I said,
"This one you probably should have accepted! I want to know who's starting the
firm!" [Laughter.]

Did you make any big mistakes
when you were starting out that you look back on with regret?
I probably should have started to
take on English language writers sooner. But I was sort of nervous about it.
There were all these brilliant agents who had gone to Harvard and were members
of the Harvard Club, where all the editors would meet. Everybody in publishing
had gone to Harvard. Except the people at Scribner's, who had gone to
Princeton. [Laughter.] I was a sort of
outsider, and I thought I'd remain an outsider, so it took me a while.

How did you come to represent
John Gardner?
We had a group of writers who came
more or less at the same time that included Stanley Elkin, Bob Coover, John
Gardner, and Sol Yurick. For some reason I seem to remember that Sol Yurick
came to us through George Steiner. He was a very close friend of Bob Coover's,
who had been with Candida Donadio but became disenchanted with her. Bob had met
a marvelous editor named Hal Scharlatt who was at Random House at the time. He
had a collection of stories called Pricksongs & Descants. He told Hal Scharlatt that he was sick and tired of
agents and wanted to do the deal with him directly. Hal said, "You can't do
that. If you do the deal with me directly, I'll have to screw you [on the terms
of the contract]." Hal told him to come and see me. To humor Hal, he came to
see me, having already decided to tell Hal that it would not work. But for some
reason he decided to come to us, and he's been our author ever since. He also
sent us Tom Boyle. They tend to come to us through each other. I can't remember
exactly how John Gardner came to us.

Tell me about your experience
with him.
His editor was David Segal, who was
good friends with Hal Scharlatt. They both had been editors at McGraw-Hill and
I think both of them had been fired from there. The three of us became friends.
We were all sort of outsiders. They were interested in writers whom nobody else
wanted, and I was interested in the same writers. And since nobody else wanted
them, they were also the only writers I could get, particularly since people
would probably discourage American authors from coming to us by saying, "Oh,
isn't that the French agent?" If you say that in a certain way it becomes very
negative. It took us a while to change that image. So John probably came to us
through David Segal. I know that David had published one of John's books by the
time John sent us two manuscripts, The Wreckage of Agathon and The Sunlight Dialogues. I also remember, quite vividly, that, being an
extremely kind person, I gave Anne the shorter book to read, Wreckage
of Agathon, and decided to work my way
through the long one, Sunlight Dialogues, not realizing that I'd given myself the much better book. [Laughter.] And I loved that book. By then David Segal had been fired by McGraw and gone to
NAL [New American Library]. The person who had fired him at McGraw had just
been appointed editor in chief at NAL. David called me and said, "I'll be the
first editor to be fired twice by the same person." He had probably called many
people saying the same thing, and he didn't actually get fired, but I think
agents stopped sending him books because they figured he would. Then he moved
to Harper, which always seemed to have, at least briefly, a literary sort of
editor, although they were mainly doing nonfiction. And he acquired nothing but
duds. Not only did he publish John Gardner, but also Cynthia Ozick and Fred
Exley and other people who lost Harper money. So he got fired again. Then he
got hired by Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. But while he was at Harper I sent him Wreckage
of Agathon and Sunlight Dialogues. He said, "I can do the short book but until this
author acquires an audience we wouldn't be able to price the long one." So he
only bought Wreckage of Agathon.
When he left and went to Knopf, I sent him Grendel and Sunlight Dialogues and he said the same thing. I said, "You can't do
that. You have to publish Sunlight,
too. If you want to, you can publish Grendel first." So he talked Bob Gottlieb into giving us a
two-book contract. They published Grendel, which did quite well—it probably sold about twelve thousand copies,
which was good, then or now—and then David died, in his early forties, having
pretty much drunk himself to death. Hal Scharlatt died at age thirty-eight,
walking off a tennis court. Those were big losses, two superb editors with good
taste and good noses. You need instincts in this business. It's so
unscientific. You can never really explain why you love something. It's like
any other form of love: you can't really explain why you're in love with
somebody or something. I think of the often-quoted sentence by Montaigne, when
he was asked about his friendship for La Boétie. He said, "Because it was he,
because it was I." That's about as close to explaining it as you can get.

Did you become friends with
Gardner?
We became good friends. I remember
he and his first wife taking our daughter and their two kids to the circus when
they were in New York. I remember going to Chinatown with them. They'd just
been in Greece, and his daughter was being very obnoxious—she isn't anymore,
she's very sweet—and trying to get attention by offering her Greek change to a
Chinese vendor. I have letters from John saying, "I know I'm one of the major
writers of my generation. All these people who don't recognize me will regret
it." Of course he was right, and one of the admirable things about writers is
that they really know they're writers. I
mean, any normal human being would just give up. Why would you do something
that nobody wants? But they do, and they have this sort of inner feeling. He
was one of a kind. People often ask me, "What kind of relationship do you have
with your authors?" Well, each one is different, just as you have a
different relationship with each one of your friends. And you're not exactly
the same person for each one of them, either.

Do you have any great stories
about Coover?
One amusing story about Bob comes
to mind. Some years ago he was asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed piece about the Intifada and
Valentine's Day. The dates coincided. It was to run on a Monday, which was
Valentine's Day. He called me on Friday evening to say that he had just heard
from the editor that they'd killed the piece because some higher-up at the Times objected to its ending, which was something like "as
the birds do, do." Evidently the juxtaposition of the two dos was just too much for the Times. So they killed it. Bob asked me what I could do. I
said, "What can I do? It's Friday night. Valentine's Day is Monday. The most we
can probably do is get a story about what the Times did published in a magazine. But that would be
months from now."

I sort of tossed and turned all night, and the next morning I
went to the office. It was Saturday morning. I remember that it was snowing. I
called Jack Miles, who was also one of our authors and whom I'd met when he was
the book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Now he was a freelance writer for them and he knew
everybody there. I told him the story and said, "I know the L.A.
Times hates the New York Times. This is a very good piece. Do you think they could
run it on Monday?" He said he'd make a phone call. I walked home for lunch in
the snow. The minute I got home, Jack called and said they wanted me to fax the
piece so they could read it. So I went back through the snow to the office.
When I got there I realized I'd never used the fax machine, which at the time
was fairly new. So I called Anne on the phone and eventually managed to fax the
thing. By then I'd gone back and forth through the snow several times and
wasn't in a very good mood. I knew nothing would happen anyway. We were having
dinner with friends that night, and five minutes before we went off to dinner,
the phone rang. It was the L.A. Times. They said, "We'd like to run the piece, but we can only pay three
hundred fifty dollars." Well, the New York Times, at the time, paid two hundred fifty dollars, which
I was going to make them pay anyway because they'd really accepted the piece.
So now Bob would be getting six hundred instead of two-fifty. I said, "Oh,
that's okay." [Laughter.] I
remember telling the story at dinner that night. When I was finished my
friend's husband said, "But how much money do you make out of this?" I said, "Normally we would have
gotten twenty-five dollars before expenses, but this way we get sixty dollars
before expenses." He looked at me as if I were totally insane. But to me this
was one of the highlights of my career.

You also represent T. C. Boyle.
Didn't he say somewhere that in his opinion you are the greatest person who has
ever lived?
He tends to exaggerate, a little
bit, from time to time. But most of the time he's right, of course. [Laughter.] When I first met him, he was the assistant fiction
editor at the Iowa Review and Bob
Coover was the fiction editor. But Bob had moved to England and Tom was doing
most of the work. I think Tom was impressed by the fact that I was actually
submitting short stories to the Iowa Review, which was paying something like thirty-five dollars
a story. One day he wrote me and said he had a collection of stories. Many of
them had been published in literary journals but also magazines like Esquire, maybe Playboy, but not the New Yorker,
which at the time wouldn't have touched any of these authors because they were
using words that the New Yorker
didn't recognize. And we managed to find a publisher for his collection without
too much trouble. Maybe three people turned it down. We sold it to Peter
Davison at Atlantic Monthly Press. Then he wrote a novel called Water
Music, which was also published by
Atlantic. But Peter didn't like his second novel, Budding Prospects, so we had to find him a new publisher. We sold it
to Amanda Vaill at Viking. Paul Slovak was the publicity director. He and Tom,
both towering over everyone else, got into the habit of hiking together and
became good friends. And then Paul later became his editor. Tom doesn't really
require much editing. His books come in pretty much ready to go. And Tom and I
have become close friends over the years. It's been great fun, and we've been
able to get him published all over the world. He's a real writer. I often say
to people in the office that the kind of writer I like to take on is somebody
whose book you can open to any page, read a paragraph, and say, "Here's a
writer."

You also represent one of my
favorite nonfiction writers, Tracy Kidder. How did you meet him?
Tracy, too, is a superb stylist.
And there, too, we've become good friends. He had written a book for which he
had an agent. I don't remember who published it or what it was about, but it
was a terrible experience and he doesn't want to hear about that book anymore.
Then he wrote Soul of a New Machine,
which he sold to Atlantic-Little, Brown himself. I don't know how he got
my name, but I remember that he came to see me, feeling that he had made a big
mistake, that he should have used an agent, that the publisher wasn't going to
do anything for the book. This was before it was published. He was very upset.
I said to him, "There isn't much I can do at this point. The first thing you
should do is call them and ask what the book's advertising budget is." In those
days publishers still had individual budgets for each book. Sometimes it was
zero, but they still had it. Now they just advertise their two main books and
do nothing for the others. But I told him that, and maybe one or two other
things, and within two weeks—I think the book had become a main selection of
the Book of the Month Club—he sent me a bottle of wine with his thanks. I had
really done nothing. I explained to him that he was more grateful to me for
having done nothing than most of my authors were when I actually had done
something. [Laughter.]

Then
he sent me three proposals for his second book. Two were business books and one
was a book about building a house. Well, to me, building a house was of no
interest whatsoever. In France, if you want a house, you buy some old stone
thing and make something out of it. But putting all this wood together? I don't
know. To me it was totally uninteresting. And, in addition, the obvious
commercial follow-up to Soul of a New Machine was another business book. So he'd asked me to rank them, and I ranked
the two business books first and House third. Two weeks later he called me and said, "You know, House is really the book I would like to write." I said,
"That's fine. We'll get you a little less money, but we'll definitely get you a
contract. Don't worry about it."

Another fantastic and significant piece by Jofie Ferrari-Adler. Thank you.

lynn@sagantechnology.com says...

Although, because "he is he and I am I", I loved Georges Borchardt from the moment I met him at his midtown office, your splendid profile (by Jofie Ferrari-Adler brought to my attention by my beloved publisher, Chelsea Green's Margo Baldwin) intensified my feelings of love-admiration. [Indeed for both agent & publisher].
Our Georges (with an "s", just like the calculating scientist-protagonist, Georges Standon, in my only published fiction, Luminous Fish: Tales of science & love) is unique and fabulous in a way precisely captured by Ferrari-Adler's insightful writing. In this near miracle interview, Ferrari-Adler has gently revealed Borchardt's genius, his capacity for survival, love and his own version of success. We, his clients, and direct recipients of his wisdom and good taste, are grateful for the revelation, in his own words beyond French, of some of his many secrets. Although he claims not to remember much, maybe Ferrari-Adler can get him to write, and then auction himself, Georges' very short autobiography. It will be worth millions.

cjewel says...

What a wonderful, enthralling interview. Thank you to everyone involved.

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